Milan announced on 31 August 2026 that Santiago Gimenez has joined Porto on loan until 30 June 2027, with an option to buy that turns into an obligation once certain conditions are met. The price of that option exists, it is official and it is a round number: 18 million euros fixed, plus a maximum of 2 million in bonuses, with 10 per cent of any future sale staying with Milan. Except that only one of the two clubs puts it in writing, and it is Porto. In the Milan statement there is not a single figure.
It is one more case in five days in which the shape of the deal is decided by a line of contract: the statement declares one part of it and stays silent on another. Here the part declared is the price, and what is left out is the condition that triggers it.
The deal at a glance
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Player | Santiago Gimenez, 25, born 18 April 2001 in Buenos Aires |
| From | AC Milan |
| To | FC Porto |
| Structure | Loan with an option to buy that can become an obligation |
| End of the loan | 30 June 2027, stated by both clubs |
| Value of the option | 18 million euros fixed, plus up to 2 million in bonuses (source: FC Porto statement) |
| What the option covers | Sporting registration rights and 100 per cent of the economic rights |
| Sell-on clause | 10 per cent to Milan, if the option is exercised (source: FC Porto statement) |
| Condition that creates the obligation | Sporting objectives, unspecified by either club |
| Loan fee | Not declared in either statement |
| Shirt number at Porto | 29 |
| Shirt number at Milan | 7, from the statement of 3 February 2025 |
| Date of the announcement | 31 August 2026, Porto statement published at 19:31 Lisbon time, 18:31 UTC |
Porto declare the price, Milan write no figure at all
The two statements tell the same story at two very different levels of detail, and the gap is worth reading line by line.
Milan published the statement in two languages, Italian and English. The English version reads: “AC Milan can confirm that Santiago Gimenez has joined FC Porto on loan, with an option to make the deal permanent - an option that will become an obligation upon the fulfilment of specific conditions. The loan runs until 30 June 2027”. Then come the customary thanks to the player. Nothing else: no sum, no fee, no percentage.
Porto write a great deal more. On their own website, at 19:31 Lisbon time on 31 August (18:31 UTC), they state: “O acordo inclui a opção de transferência, a título definitivo, dos direitos de inscrição desportiva e de 100% dos direitos económicos do atleta pelo valor fixo de 18 milhões de euros, acrescido de uma remuneração variável máxima de até 2M em bónus”. In English: the agreement includes the option to transfer, on a permanent basis, the sporting registration rights and 100 per cent of the player’s economic rights, for a fixed value of 18 million euros, plus a maximum variable payment of up to 2 million in bonuses.
That asymmetry changes the way the number has to be quoted. The 18 million is an official figure rather than a press reconstruction, but it is an official Porto figure: attributing it to the Milan statement, as can be read in several places, is a sourcing error, and the kind that then travels on its own for weeks.
Porto also specify what they are buying: not the player in the loose sense, but the sporting registration rights and 100 per cent of the economic rights, the formula Portuguese clubs use to say that no slice of the deal stays in third-party hands. Two lines almost nobody picks up complete the picture: the club takes on the solidarity mechanism owed to third parties, and states that no intermediary was involved.
No primary source on minutes: both clubs say something else
This is where the most widely repeated reading of the deal is left without documentary support, and it was our own starting hypothesis too.
The idea that the obligation is triggered by a certain number of minutes played has no primary source behind it. The word minutes appears in neither statement. Porto write: “A opção de compra pode tornar-se obrigatória mediante o cumprimento de certos objetivos desportivos”, that is, the option to buy can become obligatory once certain sporting objectives are met. Milan write “specific conditions”. Two pieces of generic wording, and neither of them contains any reference to individual output. The Portuguese daily Record writes that the objectives concern minutes played and goals scored: that is a press reconstruction, which neither statement confirms and neither rules out.
The distinction matters. An obligation tied to minutes depends on the head coach’s team selection, and therefore largely on Porto themselves, who could manage their own outlay by leaving the striker on the bench. An obligation tied to team objectives (a qualification, a league position, a trophy) depends on how the season goes and is far harder to steer. They are two different contracts producing two different sets of behaviour, and neither club has said which one it signed.
The point is this: we know the price and not the trigger. That is the opposite of the usual situation, where the structure is described precisely and the money stays secret.
The 10 per cent sell-on is Milan’s second layer of cover
There is a third element, and again only Porto declare it: “Caso seja exercida, o AC Milan terá direito a 10% de uma eventual futura transferência de Santiago Gimenez”. That is: if the option is exercised, Milan will be entitled to 10 per cent of any future transfer of the player.
Lined up, the three pieces describe a very specific position. Milan bank no declared sum today: neither statement names a fee for the loan. In exchange, if the wages are paid by Porto, which neither statement says, they take a salary off the books for a season; they hold a written price for the summer of 2027, and if that price is ever collected they still keep a slice of the sale after that. This is not a player sold: it is a player parked with a price tag attached and a receipt that is valid for the next time round as well.
From the Porto side the reading is the mirror image: they take a 25 year old centre forward with no declared outlay now and buy themselves a full season to assess him, accepting that the final decision is not entirely theirs. If the objectives arrive, the purchase fires.
Nineteen months in Milan, and one medical fact declared by a club
Plenty of accounts circulate about what happened to Gimenez in Italy, and very few documents.
What a club has actually declared is that Milan signed him permanently from Feyenoord, in a statement dated 3 February 2025: “AC Milan is delighted to announce the permanent signing of Santiago Tomás Gimenez from Feyenoord Rotterdam. The Mexican striker has signed a contract that lasts until 30 June 2029”. A contract until 30 June 2029, then, and the number 7 shirt. The fee paid to the Dutch club does not appear in that text, and we will come back to it.
The second document is dated 18 December 2025, and it is the only medical fact of the player’s difficult season declared by a club: “Santiago Giménez underwent arthroscopic debridement of his right ankle today in Amsterdam. The procedure, performed by Professor Gino Kerkhoffs in the presence of AC Milan’s medical staff, was fully successful”. Arthroscopic debridement of the right ankle, in Amsterdam, with the Milan medical staff present and a week of recovery expected before his return to Italy.
There is a further episode, closer to the transfer, that no club declares: on 6 July 2026, in the World Cup round of 16 against England, Gimenez sprained the same right ankle he had had operated on in December. ANSA reported that day that scans ruled out any lesion and pointed to a sprain. It is a news agency, not Milan, and it falls two months before the window in which the player leaves.
Everything else (how many games he missed, how long the lay-off lasted, the full picture of his physical problems) is journalistic reconstruction, and so is the count of his Milan appearances and goals: no statement we have opened declares it.
The player has offered his own assessment, and we report it in the language the club published it in. On the Porto website on 31 August: “No AC Milan não estive ao nível que gostaria, mas foram anos de muita aprendizagem”. In English: at Milan I was not at the level I would have liked, but they were years of great learning. And also: “Sinto-me uma nova pessoa e esta é uma nova oportunidade”, I feel like a new person and this is a new opportunity.
The biography Porto published skips the whole season just gone
There is a detail in the presentation material that says more than a lot of punditry. The official biography Porto published on announcement day covers Feyenoord in detail (65 goals and 14 assists, three trophies), covers the move to Milan, credits him with the record for goals by a Mexican in a single Champions League campaign (a mark until then shared by Hugo Sánchez and Javier Hernández on five), mentions the Coppa Italia final under Sérgio Conceição, and then goes straight to the national team. The 2025/26 season, the one that has just finished, is not there.
This is hardly a scandal: it is what a press office does. But it is worth knowing when you read a club biography as an archive. The numbers are selected, and the absence of a whole season is an editorial choice, not a gap in the data.
The same biography also contains the accidental correction of an error that has been going round for a year and a half. Porto write that Gimenez, after passing Hirving Lozano’s record in January, moved to Milan “no mês seguinte”, the following month. The month after January is February, and indeed the Milan statement is dated 3 February 2025. The formula “signed in January 2025”, repeated everywhere, is simply wrong.
Another number that has moved is the international one. On 3 February 2025 Milan credited the Mexican with 32 caps and 4 goals; on 31 August 2026 the Porto biography counts 51. Nineteen games with Mexico in nineteen months explain why a striker with such a complicated club season remains a fixture for his country.
Alongside Marmoush and Collyer: here the number sits inside a statement
The three cases we have covered over the last few days are worth lining up. They do not share a structure: what they share is the relationship between what the statement declares and what it leaves out.
With Marmoush to Tottenham, on 27 August, the statement said obligation and not option: the sale was already decided and only the calendar was left to run. Figures: none. With Collyer to West Brom, on 30 August, the move was permanent and the numbers (guaranteed fee, add-ons, sell-on percentage) existed only as reconstructions in the English press.
Here the relationship is inverted. The money is official and precise down to the individual line: 18 million fixed, up to 2 million in bonuses, 10 per cent of the future resale. The condition that sets everything off, on the other hand, is the vaguest of the three. The reader holds a price and not the rule that activates it, and today cannot say whether this deal will end up looking like a sale or like a plain loan. It depends on a line of contract nobody has published.
What is not confirmed, and we are not writing it as if it were
A list, because the unverified details around this deal are many.
The free loan. Neither statement says the loan is free of charge. Porto write only “cedência, a título de empréstimo”, a transfer on loan, and name no fee; Milan write only “on loan”. The idea that no money changes hands now is a press reconstruction, not an official figure.
The fee Milan paid Feyenoord in 2025. The Milan statement of 3 February 2025 declares no amount, and the Feyenoord statement we were unable to read: the Dutch club’s website turns away automated readers with a Cloudflare block, so we do not know whether it states a figure. None of the primary sources we were able to open declares the fee. The press puts it at around 32 million euros fixed, up to 35 with add-ons, with some reconstructions as low as 30: if that were right, today’s option would be worth twelve to fourteen million less than Milan spent nineteen months ago. But it is a comparison between a press figure and an official one.
Which sporting objectives turn the option into an obligation. Neither club lists them.
Who pays Gimenez’s wages during the loan. Neither statement declares it.
How long Gimenez’s Milan contract still had to run on 31 August 2026: the departure statement does not repeat it, and from the document of 3 February 2025 it would run to 30 June 2029, but no 2026 text confirms that.
The count of appearances and goals at Milan, and the full injury picture for the season. The only medical fact declared by a club is the operation of 18 December 2025; the sprain of 6 July 2026 is reported by news agencies.
What to watch now
Three things, in order of time.
The first is the pitch. Porto are the reigning Portuguese champions and on 27 August they learned the eight opponents of their Champions League league phase: if the obligation is tied to team objectives, it is that European run and the defence of the title that will decide the price, not the striker’s individual statistics.
The second is the moment one of the two clubs says something more. Unspecified contract conditions surface when they are met, or when they are not: the spring of 2027 will say, with a statement or a silence, which road this agreement has taken.
The third concerns Milan. The club has let a striker leave without banking a declared fee, and it had not even included him in the shirt-number list submitted to the Lega Serie A for 2026/27: the number 7 that had been his since 3 February 2025 was already free before the announcement was made. How that place is filled will say whether this was a sale dressed up as a loan, or a suspension of judgement on a player bought permanently nineteen months earlier.
Then there is the line the player chose to introduce himself, the best summary of a deal built to stay reversible: “Cada vez que jogar vou estar sempre com a chama acesa”, every time I play I will always have the flame lit. That goes for him. On the contract that governs him, that condition is the one nobody has yet written out in full.
Sources: official AC Milan statement of 31 August 2026, published by the club in Italian and in English, which declares the loan, the 30 June 2027 end date and the option destined to become an obligation, with no figures at all; official FC Porto statement of 31 August 2026 at 19:31 Lisbon time (18:31 UTC), the only source for the 18 million euros fixed, the maximum 2 million in bonuses, the 10 per cent of any future resale, the solidarity mechanism and the absence of intermediaries; FC Porto presentation piece of 19:30 Lisbon time the same day for the number 29 shirt and the official biography; interview with Santiago Gimenez published by fcporto.pt on 31 August 2026 for the quotes in Portuguese, reported here verbatim in the language the club published them in, with a translation alongside; official AC Milan statement of 3 February 2025 for the permanent signing from Feyenoord, the contract until 30 June 2029, the number 7 shirt, the date and place of birth and the Feyenoord and Mexico numbers as of that date; official AC Milan statement of 18 December 2025 for the operation on the right ankle in Amsterdam; ANSA dispatch of 6 July 2026 for the sprain to the same ankle at the World Cup, which no club declares; the daily Record for the reconstruction under which the objectives would concern minutes and goals. The loan fee, the price paid to Feyenoord in 2025 and the nature of the sporting objectives that create the obligation are declared by no club source: where they appear, they are press reconstructions and are flagged as such here.
Frequently asked questions
What kind of deal took Gimenez from Milan to Porto?
A loan running until 30 June 2027, with an option to buy that can turn into an obligation. Both clubs say so in their statements of 31 August 2026: Milan write of an option that will become an obligation upon the fulfilment of specific conditions, Porto of an option that can become obligatory once certain sporting objectives are met. Neither club lists what those conditions are.
How much is the option to buy worth?
Eighteen million euros as a fixed fee, plus a variable part worth up to a maximum of 2 million in bonuses. The option covers the sporting registration rights and 100 per cent of the player's economic rights. Mind the source: those numbers sit in FC Porto's statement of 31 August 2026, not in Milan's, which contains no figure at all.
Does Milan keep anything if Porto sell him on later?
Yes, if the option is exercised. Porto's statement says that in that case Milan will be entitled to 10 per cent of any future transfer of Gimenez. This detail also appears only in the Portuguese text: the Milan statement does not mention it.
Does the obligation to buy depend on the minutes Gimenez plays?
No primary source says so. The word minutes appears in neither statement: Porto write about sporting objectives, Milan about specific conditions, wording that can perfectly well refer to team results rather than individual output. The Portuguese daily Record writes that the objectives concern minutes played and goals scored, but that is a press reconstruction: neither statement confirms it and neither rules it out.
When did Gimenez join Milan, and on what terms?
On a permanent deal from Feyenoord, with an official statement dated 3 February 2025 and a contract until 30 June 2029. The correct month is February, not January: the date on the Milan statement says so, and Porto's own biography confirms it indirectly by placing the transfer in the month after January. The fee paid to Feyenoord is not declared in any club statement.
What shirt number does Gimenez wear at Porto?
Number 29, as Porto write in their presentation piece of 31 August 2026. At Milan he wore number 7, assigned in the signing statement of 3 February 2025.
